Good Friday

 The Stone Pavement

Are there yet tears?

Imagine then a pavement scored for gaming: counters fit in slots, die is cast; cloak is torn, garments shared out. Shouldering the cross-piece of his death, a condemned man is led, taunted, through the narrow streets of a busy marketplace. The curious stare. The indifferent turn away, or don’t bother. The guards shove the man forward. Stumbling, he drags his sandals up the stones of the street. Twists and turns. There is the city wall, and outside it his fate. And ours.

They lay him flat on a stone, the better to attach him to his engine of destruction. Up and in and down he goes, just another one of thousands, this one in full view of spectators. How long will this one live? More gaming. 

Either side of him, thieves, murderers, rapists - they hang together, good and evil. They will all die, one by one, gasping, suspended, a spectacle. And then, the bodies are checked. Thorough work. The soldiers lance his body. They’re sure, and can report.

Down later onto a slab of rock, weeping mother and friends place his violated body, so sweet and precious to them however it appears to the bystander. They prepare it - him - for the tomb, carved in the rock, donated, nearby, perhaps in a garden. 

That’s it for now.

Are there tears yet? Can they still flow? Can we join such sorrow to our own?

We cannot escape it. Shove it down, deny it, however angrily, however numb; it will out. 

And that is why we are here today at the foot of that self-same cross, wanting to touch it, the places of the nails, the binding, the torn and bleeding body. Or feel the sorrow. 

We don’t need to see it; we know it, in our own bones. We too have grieved, will grieve. 

For our world, for ourselves, for strangers and friends. For mothers and fathers, children, hope. 

And that too is why we are here. Because however hopeless and awful this scene of destruction, of humiliation, of death-dealing merchants and military men, the one they sought to kill yet lives. 

Hope there is still, and faith, though all will be taken away. Only love will be left. Only love endures. 

Loss, Grief, and Trauma 

Grief and loss begin in shock and disbelief; numbness. As reality seeps through that first pain-saving moment, various feelings emerge: emptiness, loneliness, isolation; abandonment - the feeling of being cut off:

“Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?” (My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?) Ps 22.1; fear, anxiety, desolation: worry for the future both of ourselves and of our community; anger; sadness and despair; and the physical toll of grief: exhaustion, inertia.

The friends of Jesus and those whom he loved felt these immediately and strongly at his arrest, condemnation, and death. Personal heartbreak - the loss of a son, a brother, a teacher, a friend, and the cosmic catastrophe of the crucifixion of the Christ, were coming together that Dark Day.

Massive communal and personal grief is why we cannot just fast forward past Good Friday. But how the Church has handled that grief is why we can be here today - and why the truth of Jesus endures.

The Death of Jesus

“The fact of the death of Jesus as a consequence of crucifixion is indisputable, despite hypotheses of a pseudo-death or a deception which are sometimes put forward.” (Gerd Lüdemann, What Really Happened to Jesus: A Historical Approach to the Resurrection. Louisville KY: Westminster John Knox Press. 1995. 17.)

“.82 red. Jesus’ body decayed” - consensus of the Jesus Seminar, Holy Saturday 1995.

What happened - what happened after that - what came before: we cannot let go of these questions. And as when a friend tells us that the end of something familiar, something we have counted on, is at hand, we ask ourselves, not only what will happen to you, but what will happen to me. What shall I do now? 

And these questions will come back to haunt us in three days - but not yet, not yet.

Right now we ask ourselves, what does it mean that Jesus has been killed? For another proposition the Jesus Seminar strongly affirmed was this: “He was crucified under Pontius Pilate, suffered death, and was buried.”

You have heard that one before. It is in the Apostles’ Creed. And however skeptical you are - better however scientific and critical and rational and objective you hope and purport to be - this is historical fact. There was a man named Jesus. The Roman governor of Judea had him executed. He was crucified and he was buried.

We would like to squirm out of this - to say he was a myth, like Alexander or Napoleon or Shakespeare - or George Washington and Alexander Hamilton. He only exists in our minds because we need him to exist. There is no reality. There is no future. There is no hope.

But we would be liars to say so. And that is our hope even in the midst of despair.

He died. So - he lived. 

Annoying isn’t it? Would it not be easier if he were myth, even true myth, like something that rings true in a story, but we know for a fact is carrying only a truth through feeling, not reality?

But alas, we cannot honestly say that. And even skeptics can tell us, oh, yes, he lived. He said the prayer over the meal, Baruch atah Adonai, Eloheinu melech ha’olam, hamotzi lechem min ha’aretz. Blessed are you, LORD, our God, King of the Universe, who brings forth bread from the earth.. He said:  Amen. 

And he called God, the eternal and ineffable source of Being, the one beyond names, he called God “Abba” - father, the intimate and loving name a Son calls his Daddy. 

And then - as the hermeneutic of suspicion goes to work - we realize he is being treated as a historical personage - like Alexander, Shakespeare, Lincoln - and we can sort out what he really said and what he really did as we might (should we be such wet blankets) sort out the authentic and the apocryphal sayings of Lincoln, Gandhi, Churchill, Einstein, and Groucho Marx.

Jesus said the most outrageous and original things - as well as things any good Jew would - and those are so challenging and so original that we must face them or simply walk away.

These sayings have come down to us in altered form, admittedly. As the first followers faced the full impact of his teachings by body and word, they somewhat absorbed that force into their bodies, their souls, and what they transmitted to us comes through that medium.

Peter, head down, was crucified, the hymn tells us. And, John on Patmos died. They stumbled forth into the early morning, the news of the women sounding strange in their ears, to a new world, one day. One day. Soon. But not yet. Today we must face the fact. Jesus was crucified. 

His tomb was right over there. You can touch it. Or touch your forehead (as I have done) to the stone above the stone that protects the place where they think he was buried. 

But he is not there. The tomb in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher is empty. An empty box.

The church has another name. We can learn it. But not yet, not today. Jesus was crucified.

And why? What hope does that death give us?

“I came into the world for this: to bear witness to the truth” - and that fidelity cost his life.

Somehow his willingness to accept death, even the death of a criminal on the cross, became part of that witness. Nothing could stop him, not even death, from proclaiming the truth.

And part of that truth is this: Love is strong as death. Death does not have the upper hand. 

The kingdoms of death will not survive. Nor will their servants. That will all be swept away.

And what will be left standing is this: the hope beyond hope, the love beyond need, the faith beyond faithfulness, the truth that endures. Even in death.

 

JRL+

Good Friday 2022. 

Michael Fick, “Living the Word”, April 15, Good Friday (John 18:1-19:42). The Christian Century.

https://www.christiancentury.org/article/living-word/april-15-good-friday-john-181-1942

Amy-Jill Levine, “Holy Week and the hatred of the Jews: How to avoid anti-Judaism this Easter” ABC Religion and Ethics.

https://www.abc.net.au/religion/holy-week-and-the-hatred-of-the-jews/11029900

Jennifer Reddall,” Bishop’s Epistle: No Christian Seders”.

https://azdiocese.org/2022/04/bishops-e-pistle-no-christian-seders/

Kenneth R. Mitchel, Herbert Anderson, All Our Losses, All Our Griefs: Resources for Pastoral Care. Louisville KY: Westminster John Knox Press 1983.

Lessons appointed for Good Friday.

https://www.lectionarypage.net/YearABC_RCL/HolyWk/GoodFri_RCL.html

• Isaiah 52:13-53:12

• Hebrews 10:16-25

• or Hebrews 4:14-16; 5:7-9

• John 18:1-19:42

• Psalm 22

https://youtu.be/tJClsrnzJII

The Death of Jesus

Dead Christ with Angels - Manet

“The fact of the death of Jesus as a consequence of crucifixion is indisputable, despite hypotheses of a pseudo-death or a deception which are sometimes put forward.” (Gerd Lüdemann, What Really Happened to Jesus: A Historical Approach to the Resurrection. Louisville KY: Westminster John Knox Press. 1995. 17.)

“.82 red. Jesus’ body decayed” - consensus of the Jesus Seminar, Holy Saturday 1995.

What happened - what happened after that - what came before: we cannot let go of these questions. And as when a friend tells us that the end of something familiar, something we have counted on, is at hand, we ask ourselves, not only what will happen to you, but what will happen to me. What shall I do now? 

And these questions will come back to haunt us in three days - but not yet, not yet.

Right now we ask ourselves, what does it mean that Jesus has been killed? For another proposition the Jesus Seminar strongly affirmed was this: “He was crucified under Pontius Pilate, suffered death, and was buried.”

You have heard that one before. It is in the Apostles’ Creed. And however skeptical you are - better however scientific and critical and rational and objective you hope and purport to be - this is historical fact. There was a man named Jesus. The Roman governor of Judea had him executed. He was crucified and he was buried.

We would like to squirm out of this - to say he was a myth, like Alexander or Napoleon or Shakespeare - or George Washington and Alexander Hamilton. He only exists in our minds because we need him to exist. There is no reality. There is no future. There is no hope.

But we would be liars to say so. And that is our hope even in the midst of despair.

He died. So - he lived. 

Annoying isn’t it? Would it not be easier if he were myth, even true myth, like something that rings true in a story, but we know for a fact is carrying only a truth through feeling, not reality?

But alas, we cannot honestly say that. And even skeptics can tell us, oh, yes, he lived. He said the prayer over the meal, Baruch atah Adonai, Eloheinu melech ha’olam, hamotzi lechem min ha’aretz. Blessed are you, LORD, our God, King of the Universe, who brings forth bread from the earth.. He said:  Amen. 

And he called God, the eternal and ineffable source of Being, the one beyond names, he called God “Abba” - father, the intimate and loving name a Son calls his Daddy. 

And then - as the hermeneutic of suspicion goes to work - we realize he is being treated as a historical personage - like Alexander, Shakespeare, Lincoln - and we can sort out what he really said and what he really did as we might (should we be such wet blankets) sort out the authentic and the apocryphal sayings of Lincoln, Gandhi, Churchill, Einstein, and Groucho Marx.

Jesus said the most outrageous and original things - as well as things any good Jew would - and those are so challenging and so original that we must face them or simply walk away.

These sayings have come down to us in altered form, admittedly. As the first followers faced the full impact of his teachings by body and word, they somewhat absorbed that force into their bodies, their souls, and what they transmitted to us comes through that medium.

Peter, head down, was crucified, the hymn tells us. And, John on Patmos died. They stumbled forth into the early morning, the news of the women sounding strange in their ears, to a new world, one day. One day. Soon. But not yet. Today we must face the fact. Jesus was crucified. 

His tomb was right over there. You can touch it. Or touch your forehead (as I have done) to the stone above the stone that protects the place where they think he was buried. 

But he is not there. The tomb in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher is empty. An empty box.

The church has another name. We can learn it. But not yet, not today. Jesus was crucified.

And why? What hope does that death give us?

“I came into the world for this: to bear witness to the truth” - and that fidelity cost his life.

Somehow his willingness to accept death, even the death of a criminal on the cross, became part of that witness. Nothing could stop him, not even death, from proclaiming the truth.

And part of that truth is this: Love is strong as death. Death does not have the upper hand. 

The kingdoms of death will not survive. Nor will their servants. That will all be swept away.

And what will be left standing is this: the hope beyond hope, the love beyond need, the faith beyond faithfulness, the truth that endures. Even in death.

JRL+ Thursday April 7th 2022.

for whom the bell tolls today

John Donne

I had not really meant to write about this but the resurrection is really about death and then about resurrection. How to die, how to see a friend die, and then to understand how to live. That is the story of doubting Thomas really. Not about doubt at all but about how to grasp reality. His friend really had died. That is common fact, historical fact. He was crucified under Pontius Pilate (the Apostles’ Creed). “Jesus’ body decayed (.82 red)” - The Jesus Seminar’s consensus.

He had died. What did it mean? What did it mean, then, that he had lived, and how he had lived? That was the question, those were the questions, that occupied the disciples after Jesus’ resurrection. 

And so they began to understand. Who he really was, who they really were, what there was to do next, after there had been nothing to do because after all he was dead and we were all going to die. But now, how are we to live?

Jesus’ reality comes stronger, now, knowing that he ‘had’ to die, to fulfill his mission he had to stay true, even though that could and did mean accepting death, execution at the hands of another corrupt administration. The chief priests and the scribes, the leaders so-called of the people, the people they were betraying, with their every breath, handed him over oh so gladly to the Roman authorities, the occupying authorities, who were the means, the instrument, the engine of execution

But he himself was the engine of understanding. He took, as the gospels give him to us, all of human experience, humanity, life itself, into himself, and made it whole and wonderful and sane even as it hurt beyond belief. Yes, others have suffered more, as many were executed his way, as he was executed, by the Roman authorities, in their thousands. And that may be exactly the point. 

He did not have to do it. He did not want to do it. He wanted to live and he wanted to live life in its fullness. And so he did.

And he did not keep it to himself. Miraculously he shared it with us.

(All this came to me in part as I was listening to the comments halfway through the second episode of “Hemingway” the PBS series. One of the writers got it right, one got it wrong, about what “for whom the bell tolls” means: I think the latter had not understood where it came from. Albert Camus did, or would have. The plague. That is where it came from. John Donne, Meditation XVII, the epigraph to “For Whom the Bell Tolls”, as I memorized it in eighth grade (but had yet to understand). John Donne was writing about people dying in an epidemic, a pandemic, the plague, as it hit London in the 1660s, - as Pepys memorialized it in his diary - and so “the bell was tolling for all of us, in Europe and the United States” is wrong: it is about death, it is the mark, the memorial, the moment, the announcement, of some one particular dying. And Hemingway got it right, and his character Robert Jordan got it right, and John McCain reading it got it right, it is about that particular death and therefore, therefore, about our own, our own humanity, and therefore our own life.) 

And so we live. Knowing what it is at last to die, we begin to know what it is to live.

***

From Meditation XVII, John Donne, (1572-1631), and from the epigraph of Hemingway’s novel:

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were: any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee. 

***

The whole thing: 

Meditation XVII

XVII. MEDITATION.

PERCHANCE he for whom this bell tolls may be so ill, as that he knows not it tolls for him; and perchance I may think myself so much better than I am, as that they who are about me, and see my state, may have caused it to toll for me, and I know not that. The church is Catholic, universal, so are all her actions; all that she does belongs to all. When she baptizes a child, that action concerns me; for that child is thereby connected to that body which is my head too, and ingrafted into that body whereof I am a member. And when she buries a man, that action concerns me: all mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated; God employs several translators; some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice; but God's hand is in every translation, and his hand shall bind up all our scattered leaves again for that library where every book shall lie open to one another. As therefore the bell that rings to a sermon calls not upon the preacher only, but upon the congregation to come, so this bell calls us all; but how much more me, who am brought so near the door by this sickness. There was a contention as far as a suit (in which both piety and dignity, religion and estimation, were mingled), which of the religious orders should ring to prayers first in the morning; and it was determined, that they should ring first that rose earliest. If we understand aright the dignity of this bell that tolls for our evening prayer, we would be glad to make it ours by rising early, in that application, that it might be ours as well as his, whose indeed it is. The bell doth toll for him that thinks it doth; and though it intermit again, yet from that minute that that occasion wrought upon him, he is united to God. Who casts not up his eye to the sun when it rises? but who takes off his eye from a comet when that breaks out? Who bends not his ear to any bell which upon any occasion rings? but who can remove it from that bell which is passing a piece of himself out of this world?

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were: any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee. Neither can we call this a begging of misery, or a borrowing of misery, as though we were not miserable enough of ourselves, but must fetch in more from the next house, in taking upon us the misery of our neighbours. Truly it were an excusable covetousness if we did, for affliction is a treasure, and scarce any man hath enough of it. No man hath affliction enough that is not matured and ripened by and made fit for God by that affliction. If a man carry treasure in bullion, or in a wedge of gold, and have none coined into current money, his treasure will not defray him as he travels. Tribulation is treasure in the nature of it, but it is not current money in the use of it, except we get nearer and nearer our home, heaven, by it. Another man may be sick too, and sick to death, and this affliction may lie in his bowels, as gold in a mine, and be of no use to him; but this bell, that tells me of his affliction, digs out and applies that gold to me: if by this consideration of another's danger I take mine own into contemplation, and so secure myself, by making my recourse to my God, who is our only security.

https://www.online-literature.com/donne/409/